Architect of the 21 Maxims
Fellow, London Business School.
Dr Jules Goddard is one of the sharpest, funniest and most gleefully unfashionable thinkers in modern strategy. A Fellow of London Business School, he has spent four decades happily convincing leaders at IBM, Unilever, Shell, HSBC, Deloitte, BP, PwC, BAE Systems and the BBC that most of what they believe about business is expensive folklore.
His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, economics and quiet provocation. Executives leave his sessions talking about the same ideas (hypotheses, heresy, internal markets, the poverty of planning) for the rest of their careers, and usually return, slightly smiling, a year later to ask what else he has.
Strategy is the rare art of making a memorable difference in a commercially viable way. Most of what passes for strategy is neither memorable, differentiated, nor viable. It is a ritual.
Jules Goddard, London Business School
The library
A short, opinionated guide to Jules Goddard's most influential writing. Start with whichever speaks to your current problem.
2012 · With Tony Eccles
Why some organisations consistently outperform others
The book that launched a thousand strategy off-sites, and ruined the cosy consensus of a thousand more. Jules and Tony argue that most management "best practice" is just common nonsense dressed up in a blazer. The firms that actually win do something stranger, braver and more specific. A joyful grenade for anyone who suspects their slide deck is doing more harm than good.
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2018 · With Rob James
A practical guide, with a foreword by Gary Hamel
If you’re tired of treating every decision like a courtroom drama, try this. Jules and Rob show how serious firms are replacing arguments with experiments: small, cheap, disprovable bets that teach you something regardless of who wins the meeting. A manual for running your company the way a scientist runs a lab, only with better coffee.
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2020 · With Alison Reynolds, Dominic Houlder and David Lewis
Ancient ideas, uncommonly applied to modern leadership
Four thinkers, twenty-five hundred years of philosophy, one very readable book. Socrates on humility, Aristotle on character, the Stoics on what you can actually control, and why Nietzsche would have been a nightmare in any leadership team. Quietly brilliant, surprisingly practical, and guaranteed to make your next town hall more interesting.
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2022 · With David Lewis and Tamryn Batcheller-Adams
How bold leadership changes the world
A field guide to the uncomfortable minority of leaders who refuse to be sensible. Drawing on decades of research, Jules and his co-authors profile the mavericks who dragged their industries somewhere new, and work out what the rest of us can steal from them. Equal parts manifesto and biography, it reads like a love letter to the cheerfully contrarian.
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2015 · Essays, London Business School
The renewal of creativity
Jules’ most personal collection: a series of essays on why the more logical your strategy, the more likely it is to be identical to your competitor’s. Beautifully written, a little eccentric, and full of the sort of ideas you’ll want to quote at dinner parties. If you’ve ever felt that spreadsheets are squeezing the life out of your business, this is the book.
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2016 · A monograph
The moral philosophy of F.A. Hayek
A slim, serious volume for the Jules completists. Here he takes Hayek seriously not as an economist but as a moral philosopher, and teases out what a society (or a company) run on Hayekian instincts would actually look like. Heavier going than his other books, but sharper for it.
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